Since industrialization, image surveillance systems, which detect the occurrence of a predetermined act or accident, have long been in use. The importance of image surveillance systems continues to increase.
In the modern society, as characteristics of informatization, unmanned systems, automation, and computerization increase, the individual stability and the stability in a place of business continuously appear as important issues. Therefore, efforts for protecting and managing properties and the safety of individuals and the place of business have been made. The importance and range of security has been widened to major facilities, public offices, schools, companies, and homes. Under this trend of the times, an image surveillance system based on light sense, which is major sense of humans, is necessarily needed in almost every system.
A representative example of an image surveillance system includes a control (or surveillance) system using a network camera (CCTV). The CCTV control system is rapidly evolving together with development in image input technology, image transmission technology, and image output technology.
The current CCTV control system outputs images, input from a plurality of cameras, on a plurality of monitors that are disposed within a control center, or disposes and thereby outputs a plurality of lattice-shaped images on a single monitor. Then, an operator or a manager performs a surveillance activity while observing images output on the monitor.
However, the number of network cameras used for the control system is increasing and, therefore, an amount of image data input into the control system is also increasing. Such an increase in image data acts as a transmission load in a network, thereby degrading the quality of images. For example, when the number of network cameras displaying which VGA (640*480, 32 bits color) images is greater than 60, all of the images are not output on the screen at one time and are output using a method of circulating the whole images, and a resolution of output images lowers and it doesn't make monitoring performance well.
With a large number of network cameras, it is difficult to know where images displayed on a monitor are located. And thus, an understanding of an image is reduced. Accordingly, there is a desire for developing an intelligent control system for rapid processing of increasing image data and efficient surveillance by a user.